


Flesh and Bone

by capalxii



Series: Flesh and Bone verse [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Author loves Danny Pink, Clara Has Two Boyfriends, F/M, Multi, Whouffaldi friendship, Whouffaldi subtext, threesome in related stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 06:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4008928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A life like his, a life less ordinary, but with enough love that that didn’t matter. (AU where Danny is brought back to life after Last Christmas.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is mainly Pinkwald, but with deliberate Whouffaldi subtext (and by the end, a touch of Twelve/Clara/Danny). I am a multishipper at heart. That said, this could, I think, be read as Pinkwald with a strong dose of Twelve & Clara friendship otherwise, as the deliberate subtext was also deliberately ambiguous. Definitely not going to be series 9 compliant.
> 
> ETA Jan 15 2016: This story was written well before the Zygon 2 parter turned Kate into a genocidal ass. While I do wish I'd had the foresight to write a different organization for Danny and Clara to deal with in this fic, it'd be a bit much to rewrite at this point so please take this as even more of an AU, where Kate isn't the lazy bigoted character who would murder an entire species instead of dealing with the issues that led to a small number of radicals that the show presented in s9.

He had no awareness of anything until, suddenly, he did. A whisper, surrounding and infusing, within and without, asking, “Will you come back? She needs you back, please say yes.”

It was a choice that wasn't really a choice at all; Danny, who was not even aware of his own essence until that question was asked, but who immediately recalled who she was and whose voice he was hearing, whispered back: 

“Yes. For her, anything.”

*

Birth could not have been so painful. His lungs burned for something, and it took him a moment to expand, to breathe in and pull air to himself; gasping, he opened his eyes and then clenched them shut again, the dim light too much, the noise of the quiet room too loud, the temperature at once too hot and too cold. He could cry out, if he remembered how. Tears formed at his eyes. 

A needle slid into his forearm, sounds like words were issued by someone else not him, and he slipped into comforting darkness.

*

When he woke up again, he only felt groggy. Some part of his memory dragged up the word hangover, though everything else about him screamed that it was a foreign concept. “Welcome back, Mr. Pink,” said a voice—a woman, commanding and calm. He forced his eyes to look at her. 

Blond, strong featured, keen-eyed. Behind her, a pair of soldiers in dark uniforms. Danny felt the bed under him, saw the hospital room around him—no window, though. Not a normal room. “Where-” His throat was raw, and he felt an ice chip pressed to his mouth. 

“UNIT headquarters,” the woman said. She was quiet, thank goodness, apparently understanding that everything was too much at the moment. “I'm Kate Stewart. This is...probably going to be a lot to take in.”

“Clara?” The name formed on his lips the same moment that her face formed in his mind. He'd done this—he'd done something, at any rate, for her, and his heart and brain and body remembered her with an almost painful yearning. 

“We didn't want to tell her until we'd known it would work,” Kate said. Her hand took his. “How are you feeling?”

An infinite void bloomed in his mind. Everything all at once, winnowed down to a single sharp edge, spread throughout him like the universe at creation. There was no way to speak it. “Clara,” he begged. 

“Shh.” A different voice, familiar, deep and lovely as the dark of night. His pale fingers touched Danny's forehead, soft and soothing. “Let me help.”

With that came order: his mind settled, memories fell into place and cracks smoothed over as something that couldn't be cool but which felt cool anyway swept through him. He didn't sleep, but he felt as though he had. “What did you do?”

“I helped,” the Doctor said with a shrug. His eyes were still as cold as Danny remembered, his face still as severe, but there was something different about him. “Just like I said I would.”

*

“Your biological signature was still on the bracelet. The long and the short of it is, you existed both in a single point, and stretched infinitely through time,” the Doctor said. Off Danny's confused look, he patted Danny's knee and added, “It's all right. I don’t think Clara would quite understand it, either.”

“Clara knows?” he asked. “Is she here?”

“Patience-”

“Don't you 'patience' me. Where is she?”

The Doctor held up his hands, trying to calm him, and said, “I need to know you're safe to be around first.”

There was a tightness in his chest; the fear of coming back wrong, of missing some integral part of himself, was deep within him as much as it was in the Doctor. “I'm safe,” he pleaded. “For her, I am.”

“Then prove it.”

Danny grasped for anything he could, but there was nothing to prove that he was safe, not really, and he knew it. “I can't,” he said, defeated. “And—there's no point in me being back if I could hurt her.”

Eyebrow raised in mild surprise, the Doctor asked, “You'd choose to die once more?”

“If there's any chance I'd hurt Clara, any at all, then I'm better off dead.”

The Doctor looked at him, calculating, pursed his lips and said, “Can't do that. Well, I can. I won't.”

The despair he'd felt earlier turned boiling, seething into something else, though something about it felt odd, off, deep under the surface. “You brought me back, without knowing if it'd be safe? And now you won't undo it?”

“It'd be wrong to-”

His hands found the collar of the Doctor's coat, and before he knew it he was slamming his wiry frame against the wall. “It was wrong to put her in danger,” he spat; the anger inside him made it almost impossible to speak, shaking him and clenching his jaw near shut as he trapped the Doctor in. It was an unfamiliar feeling, almost as though the rage had seeped in through cracks in his mind from the outside, and it was overwhelming in both its power and its strangeness. “Why'd you even do it? Why bring me back if I might hurt her?”

“Because she asked. She wanted me to, if I could. Are you cross with me?”

“Yes, of course I am. I should've known you would do this.”

“But you're not cross with her.” Off Danny's confused look, the Doctor smiled tightly. "Congratulations, PE. You passed the test."

He looked back, wariness and disgust growing inside of him. It felt new and familiar all at once, looking at that face and feeling those things. "That's it? Me saying I'd rather be dead, me getting mad at you, how is that passing a test?"

The Doctor shrugged and slid out from Danny's grasp. "She asked.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And you're cross with me, not her,” the Doctor said. “At any rate, I agree with you.”

“About what?” he asked.

He turned to leave. “I'd rather be dead than hurt her, too.”

*

He didn't know how he had survived without this. Clara was warm, soft, curled up next to him and he was so hyper-aware of her—this was what he'd come back for, and the sterile walls of the hospital room fell away around him. “I missed you,” he said. “I don't know how long it's been, but I've missed you without knowing it.”

She kissed his neck and jaw, and said, “Nine months.”

Danny twisted around and looked at her with surprise. “That long? Not that I could tell, mind.”

“It took a while to figure out how to bring you back,” she said. “Honestly, I didn't even know if it was possible, the Doctor told me he would try, and I just didn't get my hopes up. But he did it.” She broke into a wide grin, one that warmed him to his core. “And here you are.”

“Here I am.” His own smile faded slightly as he said, “The boy that I sent back—”

“He's fine. UNIT found his family, they're taken care of. He's happy.”

It didn't undo what he did, not in his conscience, but he closed his eyes and kissed her. “Good.”

For a moment, she lay quietly next to him; when she shifted and propped herself up on her elbow, he could feel a change in the room. “Danny, there's something I should tell you. I mean, I have a lot of things to tell you, but I’m going to tell you this first. It's in the past, it's not going to happen again, but—while you were dead. I mean, I didn't know if you could be brought back.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “You told me that, right? You didn't get your hopes up.”

“Right,” she said. “And so I—that is, me and the Doctor. We-” She stopped short, biting her lip and looking at him apologetically.

“Hey.” He pulled her down against him, soaking in the warmth of her and the feel of her heartbeat. “He's your best friend, there's nothing wrong with wanting someone there for you.”

She smiled sadly, shook her head. “That's not it. He wasn't—I mean, it's not his fault. I pushed him away, I thought he'd found his home and I didn't want him to feel like he had to stay,” she said.

“He found his home?”

“No,” she said. She looked up at him. “He thought—I told him you'd come back, and then he didn't want to be in the way. Danny, he was gone for months, and he only came back because—well, it doesn't really matter, it's just, long story short, we didn't see each other for a while. And when he came back, I left Earth. I was gone. It was overwhelming, I tried to move on but I'd been so alone without either of you and I just left with him.”

There was some part of him that thought he should feel alarm, or confusion, or some sort of concern over the Doctor drawing her away from humanity, but after all the things that had happened in the last few hours—he shook his head and said, “He's your best friend. When he came back, and you went with him, were you happy? Was it your choice?”

Clara looked like a weight had been lifted off her, and she collapsed against him again. “Yes.”

He smiled with a sigh and wrapped his arms around her. “Then I'm happy.”

She propped herself up again and looked down at him, her hair falling like a curtain around them. “You're really okay with it? It's not weird? I know you don't like him, I know you think he's dangerous.”

“Clara-” He let out a sigh and pulled her back down. He'd been dead, and now he wasn't, all thanks to her and her friend; and long before any of it, before he'd even ever met her, she'd been traveling the universe with this man. In the grand scheme of things—if he were being honest, and he was, he couldn't comprehend the grand scheme of things. 

Still. He'd been dead. And now he wasn't. And even though he was with Clara, even though it was absolutely the choice he'd make over and over and over again, something burned inside of him. She was right that he still didn't like the Doctor—no matter what the Doctor had done, no matter how grateful he was for the Doctor finding this second chance for him, he was even more scared of him now, given he had the power to bring people back from the dead. But Danny looked at her, and saw the worry in her eyes; worry that he'd reject her, maybe, her true question hidden from even herself, the question of whether it was too much for him and whether he'd walk away.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said, with a half-grin to disarm, “but you're stuck with me. You've brought me back and I'm not going anywhere. I'll be following you around like a lost pup in no time, just you watch.”

Something worried and worrisome flashed through her eyes, as though she didn’t quite believe him, but it was soon washed away by something so whole and open to him. “I love you.”

“I know. I love you too.” He hesitated. He remembered what she’d told him, barely, about him being the last person who’d hear that from her, but he knew her too well. Let her know, he thought. Let her know it’s fine. “And you love him,” he added.

She looked away, swallowing, and it took her some time to answer. Finally, she nodded, her eyes hooded and not quite meeting his. “Yes.” Her voice was brittle through that one word, thick. “I can't choose, I can't-”

“I know,” he said, pulling her back to him. He kissed her cheek, her lips, her brow, in quick succession, as tears streaked down her face. “I know. You don't have to choose. You have so much love in your heart, Clara, I know.”

“I missed you,” she said.

He held her tighter and let her bury her face against his neck. “I'm here.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay with me with this chapter. It does have a happy ending.

She kept coming to him each day he was recovering, her smile hiding something, some dark, frightening truth she wasn’t telling him. He was too tired to push, but finally she came to him, biting her nails, and said, “I was only waiting until you were a little better. But there’s so much more to tell you.”

Clara told Danny everything—she called it a confession, sitting across from him at the little table in his room, laying bare all the things she’d done with the Doctor. She wasn’t been able to look at him when she told him about the trip to his childhood, accidental though it was, and as he struggled to recall the moment and realized he couldn’t, that the Doctor’s wipe of his mind had been that complete, he found a thickness in his throat and a coldness settling in his chest.

“So you went to my past and—the two of you changed me,” he said, “and then you went to our future and saw our grandson?”

“Your grandson,” she said quickly. “For all I know, we break up and you find someone bet—someone else.”

For the longest moment, he couldn’t even find enough air to breathe let alone to respond to that. “I think,” he said, when he was finally able to speak again, “I might need to be alone. For a while.”

Her hair shrouded her face as she nodded, as she stared at the table, as she blanked her face and took a deep breath. “That’s fair.”

“What, no fight?” he asked. He wanted a fight, wanted something to push back against. A little resistance against the part of him that wanted to yell and run. He was breaking his promise to her almost as quickly as he’d made it, and a part of him wanted to beg her to push back against that. “That’s it, just, ‘that’s fair,’ and nothing else?”

“What else should I say?” Her eyes flashed—there. That was Clara, defiant and righteous, anger even in apology and regret. “I can’t undo it. And if you don’t want me around, that is fair. You’re not telling me anything undeserved.”

There was a sense like sand flowing out between his fingers, of himself falling like that sand, and as if from a distance he heard himself tell her, “So then go.”

She stood, chair scraping against the floor and fingers drumming against the table. It was only at the door that she turned back and said, “I’ve been honest with you this whole time.”

“Yes.”

“So believe me here. I love you, Danny. I didn’t want you to come back to lies. I owed you at least that.”

He believed her; he’d always believed her when she’d said those three words, no matter what lies they had been surrounded by. And it sang to his heart, and his heart always echoed the song back, full to bursting for her but this time there was so much noise that the song felt muddled and distant. “I love you too, but-” He held up a hand, wetness crowding his eyes and a clench in his throat crowding his words. “I just need some time alone to process, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and he heard the crowdedness in her own words.

*

“New identification. New history. New numbers in every system.” Kate looked up from his papers, peered at him from across the desk. “Kept the name Daniel Pink, though there was a bit of work involved in that. And given your situation, we thought it best to make you nominally a member of UNIT. You'll have access to administrative aid and medical aid befitting your unique circumstances, any time, day or night.”

“No job though,” he said.

“Not as of yet,” she admitted. She leaned back and Danny looked her over for the first real time. Austere, professional, but warm and he could sense humor in her beneath it all. She looked like she'd lost something, or someone, and he wondered if that was the norm for people in the Doctor's circle of friends. “We can't have you teaching, unfortunately. Not unless you were willing to relocate, possibly out of the country.”

“Yeah, no, it’s already enough of a roller-coaster without having to pick up and move, so probably not,” he said. He pushed down the growing sense of dread and focused on the positives. “Maybe something in social care? I still want to work with kids.”

Kate regarded him curiously, as though she were assessing him somehow. “Do you know how common your situation is, Mr. Pink?”

“Not...that common, I'm assuming.”

“Your specific situation, no.” She stood and walked to a filing cabinet, rifling through some folders before finding the one she needed. “But alien and otherwise supernatural occurrences are not particularly rare, especially not in and around London. Theories abound as to why, but regardless—it is what it is. Surely you're aware of it at this point.”

“I'm acutely aware, sorry to say,” he said. She dropped the thick folder on the desk in front of him and motioned for him to take a look. “What's this?”

“Affected minors in the past six months,” she said. “Children, basically, who've directly been involved with abnormal scenarios in the United Kingdom; other countries have similar files, similar systems for them. The sort of trauma these children go through can't be dealt with through normal channels. If you'd like to help, Mr. Pink, this may be the best way you can contribute.”

At one point in his life, he might have told her he didn't do weird. But he was a ghost now, he was as weird as it got, unable to fully return to his old life, no connections except to a woman who’d been so much a part of him that he didn’t even know how to process it, and unwilling to give up the one thing in which he found a true meaning. If it meant helping children, he could do weird. Taking a deep breath, he squared his jaw, picked up the folder, ignored the crushing weight on his chest, and said, “Sounds like a plan. When do I start?”

*

UNIT training was nothing if not exhaustive. For the first time in years, Danny found himself, in his government-provided flat not too far from UNIT HQ, with actual homework. He’d had a bit of an advantage with his teaching background, but there were certifications he’d never even heard of before—top secret certifications, need-to-know, to help children who couldn’t reliably be helped by the regular system.

And he was top of the class, a week into his course, more studious than he’d ever been. Not like he had anything better to do. Not like he’d been using it as a distraction. 

It had been fifteen days since he’d asked Clara to go, and in that time he hadn’t heard a word from her. Kate hadn’t said anything, thankfully, though he knew she must have known what had happened. Two weeks and a day; he could have called her himself, except he didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t trust himself not to simply collapse, proclaiming his love for her, begging her forgiveness for having asked her to go in the first place. On the other hand, he thought, that might have been the right path anyway.

If she had only fought him, it would have been different. He didn’t know how, but it would have. Maybe if she had fought, he would have realized earlier how stupid it was of him to ask her to go, and it would’ve saved him the trouble of figuring out how to get back to her. Time alone to process—he could have just gone for a walk.

Halfway through the night’s studies, he heard a strange groaning sort of repetitive whine outside his front door. Warily, he looked around for any kind of weapon, ended up grabbing his empty coffee mug, and stalked to the door. It banged open suddenly, and the Doctor walked in, asking, “Where’s Clara? Why isn’t she with you?”

Head spinning, he said, “She’s probably at her own flat, and she’s not with me because—look, it’s none of your business.” He frowned, a chill grabbing his spine. “Wait, is she not at her flat?”

“Well, yes, physically she’s there,” the Doctor said. He shut the door and leaned towards Danny. “But why is she not here? She keeps telling me you’re just out when I drop her home, but you’re not just out, you’re away from her.”

“We-” The Doctor’s entrance had thrown him off balance, but he steeled himself, remembering who he was talking to. “Why don’t you just sneak back in time and find out what happened? Or muck about in my memories again?”

The Doctor shook his head in confusion, brows knitting together as his eyes narrowed. “What?”

“You honestly don’t recall?”

“I’ve forgotten more things than you’ll ever know.” The words were cold, but there was a flicker of something—guilt, perhaps, or regret—in the Doctor’s eyes as he said it. “You’ll have remind me.”

“Rupert Pink, West Country Children’s Home,” he said. The recognition dawned on the Doctor’s face. “Now you get it? Clara told me everything.”

“She didn’t tell you enough if you blame her for that,” the Doctor said.

“I don’t blame her. I just needed some time.”

The Doctor sighed and started to wave him to the door. “Well, you’ve had time, go back to her now.”

Danny shrugged; as much as he wanted to run out the door and do just that, he knew he couldn’t. Not yet. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work?” the Doctor snapped. The guilt was still there, layered with something else under the rough exterior; nervousness, Danny thought, though he wasn’t sure someone like the Doctor could even get nervous.

“Why are you even here?” Danny asked.

At this, all those nerves seemed to wipe away, and the Doctor stared at him with open contempt. “Because she’s miserable and you’re the reason. Do you know, you were meant to have your memories wiped when we brought you back to life? It would’ve made life so much easier, but she didn’t think that was fair to you. She made that choice on your behalf.”

He hadn’t known it. Kate had said some things about certain traumas being too great for some of the children, and mind wipes being employed; it had unsettled him, deeply, though he hadn’t put together that such a thing had been on the table for him. But as far as he could tell, Clara had always had a good sense of fairness, and he wasn’t surprised to find out her intervention had saved his memories. “That’s Clara, she’s protective, that’s who she is.”

“So why are you angry at her about it?”

“I’m not angry,” he said, hating himself for the pleading note in his voice. He owed this man no explanations, but something in him wanted him to give voice to an explanation anyway. “I need time, all right? It’s not every day you find out the woman you love went back in time and—and her friend changed you, as a child, I mean do you know how much I dreamed about being that soldier without a gun? I didn’t know where it came from, for decades, and it turns out it was implanted in me?”

The Doctor smiled at him, looking for all the world like a man trying to be supportive. “And then you became that man,” he said. “That’s what you did, when you burned the clouds. Saved the whole world without a single weapon.”

“Yeah, great, except for all the other people who will never come back,” he said. “So I get to live, and all those people I ordered to burn are just gone.”

The smile dropped and he flinched back. “I couldn’t bring them back.”

“I’m not saying you should have,” he said tiredly. “But why did you bring me back?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Because she asked.”

Danny sat down heavily, ran a hand over his head. “And you would do anything she asked.”

“I had thought we were both in agreement on that. Anyway, she had nothing to do with that dream of yours.”

He frowned. “What do you mean? She said you two went-”

“Right, but it was me. Didn’t know who you were, wanted to leave, she had no idea til we’d already gone.”

Something cold settled in the pit of his stomach. “She didn’t tell me that,” he said.

“Of course she didn’t,” the Doctor said. “Why would she? She’s not going to blame me when you’re already mad at me for everything else under the sun.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. 

“So go to her.” The Doctor sat down across from him and leaned towards him. “Humans. Such short lives and you never know how to make the most of them. You said she's the woman you love. How much time are you going to waste thinking you need more time?”

He swallowed thickly, forced to admit to himself that the Doctor was right to ask that question. “I’ll go to her tonight.”

“Good. Let me take you, you’ll be right at her door in no time.”

Right. Time machine. He could do that. Danny took a deep breath and looked to his door. “Thank you.”

“No problem. Come on, she’s waiting probably, or sleeping but we can wake her up, this is important-”

“I just—could I ask you one thing?”

The Doctor stilled his movements and turned back to Danny. “Yes?”

“Why did you mess with my memories in the first place?”

“To help you sleep,” he said. “And to—to give you something nice to dream of. A soldier who doesn’t need a gun, it’s a nice change.”

“A soldier who doesn’t need a gun,” Danny said. “You mean like a general? The one who gives all the orders, lets the lower ranks get themselves dirty.”

The Doctor was as quiet as the night sky, blinking and looking away from Danny. “We should get going.”

*

Any other time, he might have been more curious about how the time machine worked. The physics of it, the idea of stepping through a portal from one dimension to another, the way it coursed through space in an instant, all of it would have interested him had he not been going to Clara to correct a mistake. 

The Doctor dropped him off outside on the grass, leaving him to make his way up to her flat on his own. He could still turn around, take the tube back home, like he was never there.

He took a step towards her building, then another, then another, until he was in front of her door, hand hovering over the doorbell. She answered barely moments after he pressed it.

“Hey,” she said, surprise and nerves evident in her voice.

“Hey,” he said back. He licked his lips and glanced down at his shoes. “How are you?”

“Good,” she said. “Yeah, just got back from a thing.”

“Save any planets?”

She shrugged and shook her head, and he couldn’t help smiling—she had, but she didn’t want to say it. “A moon.”

He cocked his head to the side and smirked. “Lots of people on it, though.”

With a laugh that sounded like relief, she nodded. “Yeah, lots. What have you been up to?”

“They’ve got me in this training program, for helping kids,” he said. “The ones who get caught up in all these alien things that keep happening.”

Her eyes went bright and wide with a smile that was slow to show elsewhere. “That sounds wonderful. God, that sounds perfect for you.”

“I think I can be good at it.” He looked down again and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Clara, I’m sorry for making you leave.”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry for hiding so many things.”

“You don’t need to be.” He huffed out a sigh, shaking his head to clear it. “I don’t know why I was even bothered.”

“Danny, you had the right to be angry about that and about so much more,” she said. “I mean I basically lied to you almost the entire time we were together, before you died. Nothing you said was uncalled for, you needing time wasn't outlandish. I don’t know why you’re _not_ angry.”

He shrugged, looked down and scuffed the toe of his shoe on the ground. “I don’t think I can be anymore, not for long. Not with you, anyway. I was half in a panic the whole last two weeks, and it was my own stupid fault. Here you were, being honest with me and I screwed it up. That was so brave, Clara. What you were doing, telling me literally everything. I mean I would never have found that out on my own, and you told me anyway, and—and I just threw it in your face, didn’t I? Then when the Doctor explained what really happened, I felt even more stupid.”

She cringed slightly. “What’d he tell you?”

“That you left out the bit where it was him, not you,” he said. “Clara, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m sorry for not—I’m sorry. For everything.”

Clara sagged against the door frame, arms crossed in front of her and head bowed slightly. “Me too. I just want a fresh start.”

Taking a deep breath, he stood up straight and said, “So here. New promise. I’m not walking away, no matter what you tell me. Unless you tell me to leave. I’ll give you something to trust.” 

She nodded. “Okay. I won’t—I mean, I can’t promise not to fuck up. I don’t know what I can promise.”

“That’s fine.” He scuffed his shoe again. “Are we just going to stand here being sorry at each other?” he asked.

She laughed again, clear and bright as a sunrise, dipped her head, and stepped aside so he could come in.


	3. Chapter 3

He dreamed of it sometimes.

There was the scent of gunpowder, a burn in the air like firecrackers and dust and blood; there was a never-ending whiteness, harsh and seared into his eyes. There was, sometimes, the feeling of something bright and jarring surging through him, gold and pure and hot, pulling his atoms apart and putting them back together again. There was heat and ozone that, on the good nights, turned into a peaceful light cutting through the terrifying dark, and when he woke up, there was Clara, stirring beside him each time, looking at him with big, clear eyes and reaching out to touch him. 

Days would go by between the dreams, then weeks. They lived. In a way, it was normal enough. Him, making friends with the men and women at UNIT, who understood both where he'd been and where he was going; her, still teaching at a school where the staff thought he was dead, and sometimes leaving for a few minutes or a few hours with her strange best friend before returning days older. Her, smiling and laughing with him, fitting together like nobody else had ever fit with him; her, curling against him when a strange melancholy overtook her, clinging tighter with her ear pressed to his chest as if to prove to herself that he was really there. It was just more than two months for him; he wondered how much time had really passed for her, and how that played into why she seemed so sad as often as she was. 

“She's not really aging,” the Doctor had confided in him once, when Clara was busying herself with making a pot of tea. “Not in a physical sense. The time vortex changes things.”

On her balcony, looking out at the city beyond them, he'd frowned and asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

“So you know you'll have a real life with her, all your years and her years roughly the same,” he'd said. “I don't want you running off for something normal.”

The word “normal” had sounded like it had left a bad taste in the Doctor's mouth. “I wouldn't run off,” Danny had muttered. “Not anymore. You know that.”

The Doctor had at least looked contrite, and Danny had to give him credit for that. “I do,” he’d said, and that had been the end of it.

One night he woke with her hand in his, her fingers tracing a line down his cheek and neck. “Would you like to talk?” she asked.

“No,” he said. She curled up closer to him, nodding and tucking her head under his chin. For a moment, that was all he needed. But his heart felt restless, fearful, and so he asked, “Do you need to?”

“Do I need to do what?”

“Talk,” he said. “Sometimes you just seem like something’s wrong, and if you don’t want to talk that’s fine, but if you ever do.” She shifted against him; he could feel her drowsiness fading away. “Is it what happened when I died?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I wasn’t in a good place, and the Doctor—I wasn’t good.”

“Did he tell you he could bring me back?”

She looked up at him, and the look on her face was desperate, mournful, confused. “He didn't. I made—I asked him to.”

Danny couldn't quite process what she said; the idea of her asking for something as unfathomable as resurrecting the dead was itself unfathomable. But he slowly started to realize what was causing her sadness, what made her look so utterly broken when she thought he wasn't looking. It was the one empty spot in their history, the one thing that she’d never been able to talk about before and he hadn’t pushed; now, it seemed like she was on the verge of shining a light on that spot, finally able to speak about it in some way. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I did something terrible.” Her voice was quiet, nearly a whisper, heavier than he could ever remember it being, and the night felt as thought it was fading further into darkness around them. “Do you know all those things you think he is? Like he’s some kind of—what I’m trying to say is, right after you died, I mean days after, I was awful and he forgave me and then he ended up doing it for me anyway.”

“What do you mean you were awful?” He propped himself up a little and tried to figure out what she was telling him, tried to find the answers in her eyes, but only saw a deep sadness and conflict. “I'm trying to follow, but I can't.”

Her eyes searched his, and seemed to search herself as well. Then she put her head down on his chest and said, “I mean I would have done anything to get you back. And I'm not proud of it but I'd do it all again if I had to. Do you understand?”

He didn't, not really, but he held her close and nodded anyway.

*

It took two days for her to come back to the subject. He'd thought she was still in the shower, getting ready for work; he was at the table, eating breakfast and scrolling a gossip site on his phone, his coffee cooling in front of him. 

When she came out and said, “You can ask the Doctor, if you like,” he looked up at her with milk dribbling out of his mouth and his spoon in hand, awkwardly trying to keep the table and his shirt dry.

“Ask him about what?” he asked.

“About all the things that happened,” she said, “after you died.”

He thought for a moment, then nodded. “You really don't mind?”

Shaking her head, she took her phone and called the Doctor, asking him to come by in an hour. By then, she'd be gone for work, and Danny would be ready, waiting on his day off to talk to this man he'd barely been able to exchange a dozen words with before he'd died.

What the Doctor found seemed to surprise him. He'd been expecting Clara, that much was clear to Danny. She hadn't explained why she'd wanted him to stop by, and his face took on a baffled look when he saw Danny sitting at the dining table, waiting for him. “Sorry, is Clara here?” he asked.

“No,” Danny said. “I had questions.”

“Oh.” The Doctor sat down across from him. He looked awkward, as though he wasn't sure what to do with his hands, or whether to make eye contact. “Well, I suppose I can try to answer them.”

“She said something to me last night,” he said. “When you two tried to bring me back the first time. She said she was awful, but she couldn't say what. Did she-” He paused, trying to gather his questions and thoughts into something cohesive. “Did she try to trick you? To force you?”

The Doctor snorted derisively. “Her, force me? P.E., do you know what I am?”

“Don't call me P.E., and yes, I do,” he said. “You're a liar, a thief, you think you're smarter than everyone around you but you're not. She said she did something awful, and that's all I could come up with.”

The Doctor cocked an eyebrow at him. “And you're angry at me, why? You’re a very angry man, Danny. Every time I see you, you’re angry about something.”

He pulled back visibly, sighing and clenching his eyes shut. “I'm not. Really, I’m not. But I wanted to understand, and she said I should talk to you.”

“To answer your question, yes, she tried to do some terrible things, it's done, I've moved on.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at Danny with closed-off eyes. “Would you not have done the same? Even after all those lies she told you, and told about you, after everything she put you through, would you not help her if she asked?”

“Of course,” he said. “But that's not why I'm asking about it.”

“Then why are you intent on digging up the distant past?”

“You don't see her every day here,” Danny said. “With you, she's caught up in the adventure, but back here? On Earth? She's not—look, it's not the distant past for her. That's what I'm trying to say.”

The Doctor looked away for a moment, and on his face Danny saw the walls drop before he could put them back in place. “I see more than you think. Sometimes I wonder-” He stopped, took a deep breath, then looked at Danny with a piercing gaze. “You were right. She betrayed me. Tried to kill me, not that it would have worked, tried to hijack the TARDIS. Because something awful happens to a person you love, and you will do anything to undo it. You will put others at risk, yourself at risk. You'd tear out your own hearts if it made them happy, even for a moment, and you'd certainly tear out someone else's. You've made a promise to them, to yourself, to keep them from harm, and you can't go back on it. I know you understand that, because I saw it in you. Even before that day in the graveyard, I saw what you'd do for her.”

“I understand,” he said. He understood more than he’d thought possible, more than he’d thought the Doctor would want either him or Clara to understand. He licked his lips and hesitated at his next question, unsure if it was his place to ask, even more unsure of what he would do with the inevitable knowledge he was steadily marching towards. “Is that why you forgave her so easily?”

The Doctor shrugged and smiled tiredly. “It was one drop in an ocean of experiences.”

“Experiences with a woman you love.” It wasn't accusatory; it wasn't even resigned. A simple statement of fact, nothing more.

The Doctor swallowed and his face took on a faraway look, lost and caught in a wilderness of his own thoughts. “You will do anything,” he said.

That was it, then. The honest, bare moment he hadn’t realized he’d needed from the Doctor, laid out in front of him on a quiet mid-morning at home. There was an understanding that hadn't been there before, a sense of calm in Danny now that it was out in the open; it was something he could recognize in himself, that ability or flaw or trick of the heart that would allow her nearly anything if it meant she’d find a home in him. He knew he should have been scared, but he wasn’t, because he knew in his heart he’d do the same or worse if he had been in her position. “I never did thank you,” he said.

“For bringing you back?” The Doctor dismissed it with a flick of his wrist. “It was nothing.”

“No,” Danny said. “I meant for being there for her while I was gone. I know she doesn't need looking out for, she can take care of herself, but it’s weird, yeah? Everything she’s been through. And not everybody would understand it. So thank you for being around for her.”

A flicker of something across his face, a flinch at a memory before a calm smile settled into place; Danny remembered Clara telling him about the incident on the moon, and how the Doctor inadvertently left her alone for months after he’d died, and he realized that the distant past wasn’t quite as distant as the Doctor had claimed earlier. “Our Clara's made of sturdy stuff,” he said. 

Something unfurled and pulled taut inside of Danny's chest and he said, “Even the sturdiest people need help sometimes.”

The Doctor smiled tightly. “Maybe. If the need arises, we'll just have to prop her up ourselves, won't we?”


	4. Chapter 4

It took some time, but eventually Clara chose move to a different school. Still in London, no need to move out of her flat, but it was enough of a change. Easier to have a boyfriend around when one worked at a school where nobody knew him as a dead man. Easier for that boyfriend to make friends outside of work, as well. 

But he still found himself at the same pub with the same people, men and women from the office who he could talk to about football just as easily as he could talk about anything and—it wasn't normal. He knew that. He should have friends from beyond work but there was no way, not in any real sense, that anybody else could know, much less understand, what he'd gone through.

It was a familiar enough situation, in a way. Used to being a man apart, one step out of sync with the people around him, he sat at the counter and resolutely stared into his pint until he could reasonably excuse himself and go home. A hand slapped his back and he started, only to see Kate's smiling face as she sat next to him. “Can't be that bad, Pink,” she said with a grin. “Come on, finish your pint, next one's on me.”

“Think I'd like to get going after this one, actually,” he admitted. 

“Nope, sorry,” she said, “not until I've got you drunk and talking.” The grin faded as she leaned a little closer to him. “Everyone knows you're good at your job. So don't think that's in question here, but I'd like to know: how are you doing? You always seem to be on your own, even in a crowd.”

“I'm fine,” he said, bristling slightly. “Really, I'm just a homebody, that's all. Always preferred to keep to myself.”

“Hmm.” She didn't look like she believed him, but seemed to let it drop and sipped at her drink. “Do you know, the day the dead rose—I was supposed to die?”

He blinked in confusion. “What do you mean, supposed to?”

She arched an eyebrow and smirked. “Haven't heard this story yet? Would you like to?”

He rolled his eyes and couldn't help the way his mouth twitched into a smile. “No boss, I have not heard this story, and I'm about to whether I want to or not, aren't I?”

“Good man. Yes, you are. The plane I was on exploded. Nearly everyone on board was killed, except me. Do you know why?”

“Let me guess,” he said. “The Doctor saved you.”

“No, he was busy falling from the sky himself,” she said. “No—it was my father who saved me. My deceased and converted father.”

He could feel the chill of metal against him suddenly, the pull of the studs digging into his face. His hand twitched, wanting to be sure of his own flesh, but he kept a grip on his glass instead. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm glad he saved you, but I'm sorry. That's horrific.”

“Yes,” she murmured. Something unfolded behind her eyes, as though she'd realized this wasn’t just a case of getting an employee to open up about what was bothering him. As though she’d realized who she was talking to, and just what it meant for him to attach such a label to her father's experiences. “I have nightmares about it sometimes. He'd spent so much of his life protecting this planet, and for that to happen to him, I-” Kate was silent suddenly, a muscle in her jaw twitching, her throat moving like she couldn't swallow around something lodged in it. “Tell me, Danny, if you can. What was it like?”

The fear, the confusion, the strange sense of betrayal all came back to him. Those feelings had never really left him, they'd only been pushed down deep into his heart, buried under so many other things that were bad but not quite that bad. He could have lied to her, in that moment, to spare her, but she was sharp and would know what he was doing. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“It really can't be worse than what I've already imagined.”

“It was painful,” he said. “To know what had happened, it was terrible beyond belief. To know what I'd become.”

She nodded. “Thank you.” In her voice, he could sense gratefulness for the truth even as it must have gutted her to hear it.

“It was also-” He spun his half-full glass in his hands, struggling to find a way to speak that didn't sound mawkish or patronizing. “I wouldn't have been able to do what I did had I not been aware. So in a way, I'm glad. I wouldn't have—I mean, it was better than just being a drone. It was better, to be able to fight it.”

Kate took a deep breath; he barely heard it over the din of the pub. Someone behind them must have told a decent enough joke, because his coworkers had erupted in laughter. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose it would be.”

“How are you doing?” he asked quietly.

There was a moment, more of a stutter in time than anything, where a wall seemed ready to crumble inside of her. But the moment passed, and there she was again, Kate in all her immense stature, in all her distant cool and good humor. “Steady as always,” she said. She smiled ruefully at him. “Sure I can't buy you another?”

He shook his head. “Really just want to get home to Clara. I've got nine months to make up for.” She smirked into her drink and he felt the blood rush to his cheeks. “Not like that, I meant-”

“I know what you meant, Pink,” she said with a chuckle. “Go on. I'll see you at the office.”

*

“Snowdonia,” he said, pulling Clara to him as he lay on the sofa. She smiled and shook her head. “Too outdoorsy?”

“Too far,” she said. She nuzzled against his chest; the news sounded like a drone in the background, the light of the television flickering blue, yellow, pink against her skin. Absently, she trailed her fingers up and down his arm, sending sparks through him at her touch. “Somewhere close, I don't want to spend half the weekend traveling when we could be together instead.”

“How about...” He grinned, hoping he looked rakish instead of dopey. “Swanky hotel room in a part of town we could never afford, jacuzzi and room service and nice views all around?”

“Don't think I'd want to spend much time looking at London, we live here,” she said.

Danny's grin grew wider. “Didn't say the view would be of London.”

Clara crawled up his body and kissed him lightly. “Oh, won't you get cold without any clothes on?”

“Wha—I—well. You'll just have to keep me warm, Miss Oswald.”

“Nice save, Mister Pink.” Smiling, she kissed him again, deeper this time. “And it sounds perfect.”

He hesitated for a moment. “Does it? I mean, it's not space travel or whatever.”

She pulled back slightly, propped herself up and looked him in the eyes. “I don't want you for space travel,” she said. The look on her face melted any insecurities he might have had. “I want this second chance. I'm doing it right this time.”

Second chances had never really been in Danny's life before, and some days it still felt like he was floating through some alternate reality, some story made up to while away his time in purgatory. She sat up, straddling his hips, and her hands were soft and warm against his stomach. “What do you want from me, then?” he asked.

Clara shrugged and shook her head, looking down at her fingers as they traced lines on him. “Just you. Whatever that entails.” She looked up suddenly, her eyes bright as they fixed on his. “What do you want from me?”

Surprising even himself with the answer, he said, “Exactly the same thing.”

“Doesn't matter that I'm sort of weird? I mean I know I'm weird, Danny, I get that.”

“Does it matter that I'm kind of boring?” he asked with a lopsided smile. “You've traveled the stars, and all I have on offer is a hotel room. Or walks in the park.”

“That's not boring, it's just a different kind of adventure, that's all,” she said. “Which, yes, it did take me long enough to figure that out.” But she paused, and the smile faded from her face. “Besides, I think sometimes boring is nice. Can't do much wrong with boring.”

It had been a while since she'd gotten like this; her eyes were distant, some kind of guilt crushing against her shoulders and curling her into herself. But it was hidden away almost as soon as he saw it in her. “I know you don't think you can talk about it,” he said, “but you can.”

“No, I know,” she said. She brushed her hair away from her face and frowned. “Do you ever wonder? About the boy you—you sent back. Like, what's he doing, or if he forgives you?”

He licked his lips and shook his head. “It’s not-” He hesitated, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulled her against him and frowned. “If he forgives me, it’s not for me. It’s for him. I don’t deserve to find out, it's not my place and I have no right. But you know something?”

“What's that?”

“The Doctor forgave you a long time ago,” he said. “I don’t think you have to worry about him. You know what he thinks of you, right?”

She was quiet for a long stretch after that. “Can you forgive yourself?”

His hands stilled for a moment on her back, the soft smile he'd been smiling for her frozen on his face before it withered. “No,” he said honestly.

Her fingers curled against his shirt and she sighed against his chest. “Yeah.”

*

It was still dangerous, the things she did with the Doctor. Whenever she was away, his heart remained firmly lodged in his throat. They were finished pretending she didn't run out and put her life on the line whenever she was traveling—and though he'd never had any doubt about how well she could hold her own, and though he had seen her in action more than once saving the lives of others, he still couldn't help but worry.

All those years in the service, he'd never once thought he'd be the one sitting at home trying to think positive thoughts for a loved one abroad. Wryly, he'd wondered out loud one day at work if there was a support group.

“Well,” Kate had said, pursing her lips. “Could put you in touch with some former companions. Not exactly a formal group, mind you, but they're a good bunch. Most of them traveled with the Doctor, but some simply know him through others.”

“Maybe not quite yet,” he'd said; still, the idea of people having known the Doctor and survived to talk about it had been comforting. “Did you give any thought to my proposal?”

“Oh—I was going to tell you, I passed it by treasury,” she'd said. “Unfortunate that such a thing has to be done, but on the bright side it looks like we've got the money for it. Think we have the staff as well, presuming you'd lead the crew.”

“I wouldn't dream of handing it off to anyone else,” he'd said. 

He'd already talked to Clara about it. A weekend each month, where he would take his kids out to the woods, to wander and relax and do nothing of any real import for a day and a half; in this new era of honesty, she'd asked him if the time away would also help him deal with her being away, and he'd had to admit that it would. 

So he found himself seated in front of a campfire, the children in the UNIT program mostly in their bunks for the night, with Kate Stewart seated next to him. She'd told him that as the head of the organization, she'd had to make an appearance at the inaugural event for appearance's sake, but he hadn't missed her sneaking off with extra s'mores earlier, and he hadn't missed the way she'd looked as she enthralled the children with her stories.

Cinders wafted into the dark, floating like ghosts above the heat. “Congratulations, Danny,” she said. “They seem happy.”

“Happy enough, at least,” he said. Things would never quite be the same for the children; they’d all seen things they shouldn’t have seen at such young ages, some had lost family or friends. But there was a space he had carved for them, where they could breathe and just be children for a moment, and it only made him want to carve an even bigger space out, to let them know that there were people who would be there for them and understand them. “Thank you.”

“And you?”

He smiled at her. “Always. Since it's that kind of conversation, apparently, how's Kate?”

The firelight against her skin and hair glinted gold, at once brushing away darkness and creating more of it in its wake. “Steady.” But hesitation flickered across her face quick as a shadow, and she said, “My dad used to take me camping like this. Ages ago. We'd go fishing.”

“Sounds...wonderful, really.”

Her smile seemed regretful. “I thought he was the most boring man on earth. I loved him dearly of course, but I thought all he did was paperwork all day.” With a huff of laughter she added, “Turns out I wasn't actually that far from the truth.”

Back in his own office, there was a tall stack of papers on his desk left to be filed, and he smiled in commiseration. “When did you find out what he really did?”

“I was an adult, I had a child of my own,” she said. “Had no idea what he was running around doing until then. I wish I’d known. I wish—well, a lot of things, really. Wish I could see him again as he was.”

He looked down at his hands, the memory of metal digging into his joints giving him a sudden, brief pang of pain. The Brigadier hadn't been among the ones who'd burned the clouds, he couldn't have been if he were on the ground with Kate. He couldn't ask what had happened to the man after everything had been said and done. He wasn't sure that he wanted to know. So he said, “Still, the fishing thing. That sounds—it sounds like it was good.”

She leaned forward and stirred the fire. “Yeah,” she said, her voice barely rising above the crackling of the wood. “It was.”

*

Clara wasn’t home yet when Danny returned from the woods. Dinner was on him, then; he set about getting things prepped and made while he waited. He didn’t have to wait very long, and by the time he’d finished chopping vegetables, he heard the key in the door. “In the kitchen,” he called out.

“Ooh,” she said. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “God, thanks, I’m famished.”

“See anything interesting?” he asked.

She shrugged behind him. “Daleks.”

“Oh, just daleks.” He smirked, put down the knife, and turned around in her arms. ”No biggie.”

With a smile, she got on the tips of her toes to kiss him. “Nah. How was the weekend with the kids?”

“No daleks, but Kate swung round.” He frowned. “Not that I’m saying she’s as bad as a dalek. Anyway, kids had fun.”

“Did Danny have fun?”

Her hands were scratching his stomach idly, so he took them in his and brought them up for a kiss. “Danny had lots of fun.” For a moment, he thought about what he wanted to say, not able to meet her eyes. “Do you remember, back when I did that really stupid thing and kind of almost broke up with you?”

“Pretty well,” she said with a confused frown.

He managed to look her in the eyes. “You said you didn’t know what to promise. I want to try something.”

Clara’s smile looked wary, skeptical, and more amused than anything else. “Danny, I’ve got my own definition of ‘too weird,’ just letting you know.”

“No, not like—” He huffed out a breath, flustered and sheepish. “I mean I want to not be so regretful all the time. I want to be more than my screw-ups. There are things I can’t forgive myself for and I can’t forget, but I want to—I don’t know, be able to define myself by the good I can do more than the bad that I’ve done.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “You want my help?”

“Yeah, and.” He bit his lip and said, “I want you to try to do it with me. You’re so much better than I think you think and I want you to see what I see.”

Clara searched his face for a long time. Then she took his face in her hands, pulled him down, and kissed him.


	5. Chapter 5

A blessed night in, movie night at that, with a mug of cocoa in hand and Clara getting comfortable beside him—it was all he really wanted. She had starlight in her eyes, flush from a trip in the far-flung future to watch a solar system die, yet she had broken into a grin when he’d asked if she only wanted to watch something silly and throwaway with him. There were days he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it, that this woman of the universe would look at him and see something half as wonderful as the things she’s experienced. There were nights he was sure that the universe had nothing better to offer him than her. With the feel of her body against his, her feet tucked up under her and her head against his shoulder, this was one of those nights. 

That said, the movie wasn’t quite up to par, and he asked, “Want to watch something else?”

“Probably for the best, let’s just forget the last half hour,” she said with a click of the remote. “In the mood for anything in particular?”

He shrugged. “Whatever you like.” When she looked up at him with a smug, knowing grin, he rolled his eyes and yanked the remote from her hands. “Minx.”

“Shut up, you like it.”

Danny sighed in mock defeat. “Yeah.”

“So I was thinking,” she said as he flipped through the channels. “We should tell my dad and gran. About you, I mean.”

He stopped on some interior design show and frowned at her. They’d kept things fairly secret, with nobody outside of UNIT knowing about Danny, and Clara had seemed all right with that. Dave had become a friend of his, before, and he had to admit he’d been wondering if he’d have to hide from her family for the rest of his life. A relief he hadn’t quite realized he’d been waiting for came over him, but he hid it and said, “We can keep it from Linda, though, right? Wouldn’t mind that.”

She laughed and tried to smack his chest, finally succeeding even though he tried to squirm away. “Sorry. It’s going to be worth it just to see the look on her face.”

“Why now?” he asked.

Clara shrugged and shifted against him so she could look at him. “I’m happy,” she said. “They think it’s because I’ve moved on. I want them to know the real reason.”

He lost himself in her deep brown eyes, and thought: the universe had nothing on Clara Oswald.

*

It was, all told, possibly the strangest family dinner he could have imagined, though from what he understood it was nothing compared to the Christmas before last.

Dave, once he’d gotten past his initial excitement over Danny being alive, had decided to go on a magical mystery tour of conspiracy theories that Danny couldn’t quite discount or deflect; Linda had simply sat through the ordeal gaping like some kind of judgmental, passive-aggressive fish. Clara’s gran, however, had looked at him with such a familiar warmth that he it nearly made him uncomfortable, until she had pulled him aside for a hug and whispered, “Of course you would.”

He hadn’t been sure what she’d meant, except that night when he lay next to Clara, watching her sleep, spread out on the bed so peacefully—of course he would. 

*

To say that he felt like a free man after that would be an understatement. Between Clara’s family, work mates, and a few friends he’d picked up elsewhere, he was on the edge of something he’d been craving for so long he could almost taste it. 

It was only the dreams, really, that marred the experience. 

The normal ones, he had gotten used to. Some of them were similar enough to the dreams he’d had before he’d ever met Clara, and he’d learned to live around those. The new ones—the white rooms, the metal in his bones, silver shimmering valleys and a burning sky—they were parts of his soul he couldn’t navigate, couldn’t even look upon for too long for fear of his own memories. Dreams of his own childhood merged with something breathtaking and alien, where he would be running through the green wooded fields behind the children’s home until they became bleak, bright and never-ending. And always, the bad ones ended with darkness suffocating him, and the good with a light pulling him through.

She’d asked him, some time ago, if he’d wanted to talk, and he hadn’t, not then. But maybe he wanted to now—to share the dreams with her, to get her help in figuring them out. Not all of them were from the place he’d been when he’d died, and he wondered if he hadn’t brought someone else’s memories back with him, somehow. One morning, he woke and as he lay in bed decided to tell her; that he got distracted was no surprise, all things considered.

He found her in the bathroom, standing in a camisole and boyshorts, biting her nails and staring down at a small bit of plastic. “Clara?”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and shining, her face without any makeup and as beautiful as ever, but so ashen, so scared. “Do you think-” Her voice cracked, and she said, “Danny, do you think I’ll be any good?”

Small bit of plastic. Dangling from her fingers, it looked as inconsequential as possible, but all thoughts of dreams and borrowed memories fled from his mind as the implications clicked. “Yeah,” he breathed; he reached for her, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her as close as he could. “God, yeah, you’d be brilliant. Do you want to be? I mean—do you want—?”

Her voice was muffled against his chest, but he felt her nodding and heard her say, “Yes. Yes, I want. With you. Is that okay?”

“It’s beyond okay. You want breakfast? I can make you breakfast, whatever you like, or I could go out and buy something, I’m awful at breakfast-”

“Danny,” she whined, but she was smiling up at him, laughing quietly. “I’m the one supposed to be freaking out, not you. And certainly not over breakfast, though, yeah, you’re not really that good at it.”

“Can we both freak out a bit?” he asked. “You’re going to be a mum. Oh my god, I’m going to be a dad. I’m going to be-” In that cramped little bathroom, two people’s worth of junk cluttering the counter and shelves, with a plastic stick she’d just peed on minutes ago digging into his ribs—he pulled her even closer, buried his face in her hair, and decided that there was no moment and no place more perfect than this.

*

They weren’t telling anyone just yet, not until she started showing. 

At least, that was the plan.

Clara stormed through the front door, slamming it shut and nearly startling Danny right off the sofa. “He knows,” she spat out; she threw her jacket in the general direction of a chair and seemed to hope it would land somewhere in the vicinity, then kept storming towards her bedroom.

“Who—what—knows what?” He clambered off the sofa and followed. 

“He. Knows. He says he didn’t scan me on purpose, but I know him, he’s lying-”

The front door flew open and a flurry of a man came through. Danny rolled his eyes and sighed as he realized who had figured out what. “Oh come on, I’m not lying,” the Doctor said. “Not really. I wasn’t scanning for a reason, I just scan everybody, can’t be too safe, don’t want to bring something contagious on board-”

“He scanned me,” Clara said, so hotly that Danny almost took a step back. “And now he wants to give me advice.”

“Hang on,” Danny said. He turned to the Doctor and asked, “You didn’t scan her on purpose?”

“The TARDIS scans everybody,” he said, sounding a bit helpless. “It truly is a safety precaution. So when she saw...well, two. She went on alert.”

Clara spoke through clenched teeth as she said, “The cow started bleating at me.”

“She’s just happy for you,” the Doctor said. He flapped his arms in something close to defeat. “They were happy bleats.” Danny could almost see the moment that the Doctor realized what Clara had just said, the moment where he realized that he ought to be offended, as the Doctor’s face twisted into a scowl the likes of which Danny wasn’t sure he had ever seen on a real person before. “And my TARDIS is not a cow!”

He could see Clara gearing up to say something she might regret, so he said, “Clara, it sounds like it really was an accident. I don’t think he meant it.”

“See? Pink understands-”

“Shut up.” A warning glare to the Doctor, then back to Clara. “And he won’t be telling anyone else, so it’s just us right now. Right, Doctor?”

“Right,” he said, nodding along. “Nobody will get a word out of me. But please, Clara, would you take my advice?”

“No.” She turned to Danny. “He wants me to go to the future to give birth.”

“I know you’re quite happy with the miracle of modern medicine,” the Doctor said to her, “but imagine medicine even more modern and miraculous. It’s easier, it’s safer-”

“I said no. There are perfectly good hospitals here.”

“Fine,” the Doctor said, half sneering. “Go have a baby in some dark, abysmal, unclean little hovel somewhere instead of an actual medical facility, that’s perfectly logical.”

Danny took a deep breath and frowned, glancing first at the Doctor, then her. She was firm, adamant, and set to burst with something simmering under the surface. But the Doctor’s flippant, dismissive anger was a front—easy to see through, with flashes of anxiety under the facade. Easy for him, anyway, as Clara continued to glare and scowl. He couldn’t find fault in the Doctor’s advice, either, as much as that surprised him, but the idea of heading off to a much safer futuristic hospital didn’t seem to sit well with Clara and he had no idea why. He licked his lips and asked, “Clara, why’s it so important to stay here?”

“It’s not, it’s just—” She cut off her protests, bit her nails and said, “Because that’s how my mum did it. And I want that. If I can’t ask her what it was like, I want to find out for myself.”

He reached for her hands and kissed the crown of her head. Looking at the Doctor, he saw nothing but understanding and a dose of shame; in spite of himself he couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man. He was only worried for Clara, and so Danny said, “Then you’ll stay here—but Doctor, why don’t you stay with us? Or drop by sometimes? If something truly goes wrong, Clara, would it be okay if we went with him then?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. But only if it’s something really wrong, like they can’t fix it here.”

“That’s fine,” the Doctor said quickly. “I can work with that.” He turned to leave suddenly, then turned back, wringing his hands and frowning. “I think—congratulations are in order. So congratulations.”

Danny looked at him for a moment, and saw a man lost, frightened, and he knew what it was to be on the outside, to never quite fit with the rest of the world around you, so he saw that too. As the Doctor started for the door again, he said, “Where the hell do you think you’re going? Sit down, both of you. I’m assuming time lords drink hot chocolate?”

*

They were still talking inside. Above him, only a few stars were faintly visible; he stood on the balcony with the remnants of his hot chocolate, holding on to the now-cold mug rather than risk interrupting them to put it in the sink. The balcony door slid open and he turned to see Clara come out to stand with him.

“Had to break the news gently,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell him yet, but he knows that sooner rather than later our trips will be put on hold for a while.”

Danny let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Okay.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned back against the railing. “Maybe forever,” she said hesitantly, her face hidden from him in shadow.

In his wildest dreams, he could see them in a house somewhere pleasant and calm, both of them coming home from work, their child or their children loud and happy around them—but that wasn’t Clara. That wasn’t what he loved about Clara. Perhaps at some point he’d loved the idea of that woman, but fate and love are tricky things, ideas fade as reality sets in, and the woman he loved was a wanderer. To tie her down would be a cruelty, a sin, he thought, and a betrayal of her that he couldn’t fathom, even as she offered it to him herself. He set the mug on the ground and pulled her into his embrace, her back to his chest and his arms wrapped around her waist. “Maybe not forever,” he said. “Maybe just as long as you like, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go along.”

She relaxed against him, the tension in her shoulders dropping. “You’re not scared at all?”

“I’m terrified,” he admitted. “But...Clara, I died. By getting hit by a car. I thought maybe there was such a thing as a safe life, but there isn’t, and I’d rather have ten minutes with you being happy than a hundred years with you having regrets because you tried to be something you’re not. A lot of the guys I served with had families back home, kids. We’ll make it work.”

Clara turned around in his arms to face him. “My mum never got to see any of the places she wanted to,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“But I don’t want my child to miss her mum before she has to.”

He shrugged. “Family vacations with the weird uncle—to places that are, you know, as safe as possible. Best of both worlds.” She laughed and he held her tight. “We’ll figure it out.”

She smiled up at him, her nose crinkling. “He’s the weird uncle now? Can I tell him?”

“Is it gonna make him mad?”

“Probably.”

“Make sure I’m around to see.”


	6. Chapter 6

There was a side of Kate he hadn’t seen, prior to telling her about the pregnancy. It had been half out of professional necessity—they’d need to prepare for him being out, for finding coverage while he was on leave—and half due to the fact that he had been bursting to tell someone the news. She was the same Kate, still commanding, cool under pressure, still everything he had come to know from her, but every now and then he’d come back to his desk to find a post-it with a tip passed on from someone else, a pamphlet for expectant dad seminars and classes, a link emailed to him for employee discounts for all sorts of baby paraphernalia. 

He’d never had a big sister before. He had to admit it wasn’t half bad. 

Clara had her dad, she had university mates. A whole squad of women with tips and tricks, stories both good and bad, who ended up at their flat and who Clara hadn’t had to explain his existence to; the only one who had actually met him before had been, bizarrely enough, secretly on UNIT payroll, and had barely raised one eyebrow when he’d re-introduced himself to her. If it was strange to the others that Clara had moved on as quickly as she had—to them, they had only been together barely six months, and here she was coming up to three months pregnant—they said nothing. Even Linda, in her own peculiar way, had been lending a hand, rallying the troops, slightly terrifying the townsfolk with organizational skills and demanding nature. 

Danny also had her dad, but sometimes, occasionally, he’d see the Doctor staring at him with this look on his face. Something like a curious scowl. Deciding the direct approach would be best, Danny called him over one day when Clara was out with her friends, made them both some hot chocolate (the amount of sugar the Doctor put in tea made him somewhat queasy, somehow adding sugar to the chocolate wasn’t nearly as distressing), and asked, “So what was it you wanted to talk about?”

“You called me here,” the Doctor protested.

“Yes, because you keep staring at me.” Danny sighed. “Ever since she got pregnant, every time you come by to see her, you end up looking at me funny. What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Is Clara all right?”

“She’s fine, yeah,” Danny said. “I know you’re worried, but she’s really okay. Anyway, couldn’t you just skip ahead and find out?”

The Doctor shrugged—somehow he managed to do that with his eyebrows—and leaned back in his chair, licking his lips. “She made me promise. Not to do that, I mean. She doesn’t want to know anything about the child’s future.”

Danny frowned at him. “So you’ve just been leaving, going off to do whatever for however long, and then coming back right where you left off?”

He pulled a small book out of his coat. “She gave me a journal so I can keep track,” he said. He flipped it open, his fingers tracing against notations in tiny scrawl, a language Danny didn’t quite recognize.

Except he did.

Curves and circles, linked together and connected by graceful lines, broken up by patterns of points. He dreamed shapes such as these but had assumed they had no meaning. Before he could stop himself, he reached across the table and dragged the book towards him, scanning the symbols and trying vainly to understand them. “What is this?”

“Gallifreyan,” the Doctor said quietly. “You know it.”

His eyes shot up and he glared accusingly at the Doctor. “How do you figure?”

“Are you having dreams as well? Of places you’ve never been, things you’ve never seen?”

Danny thought back to the nights he woke up with the feel of the desert sun on his skin, the harrowing sense of making exactly the wrong choice at once familiar and strange. Nights where he stood in the valley below a great house halfway up the mountainside, speaking to men and women he’d never known about things so unfamiliar, where a single fired shot rang through a dilapidated old building nothing at all like the one he’d known from the war. He’d thought his imagination had been getting away from him, but the language on the pages in front of him had spilled out from pens onto tablets in his dream, from chalk onto slate and he narrowed his eyes. “If you did something to me-”

“I brought you back,” the Doctor said; his voice was strong but there was something to it that sounded like an apology. “I tried to keep it as simple as possible, but I may have given you too much.”

Biting his lip, he stared down into his chocolate and watched the steam rise from its surface. Eventually he said, “Should Clara be here for this conversation? Or does she already know whatever you’re trying to say?”

“She should,” he said. “And she doesn’t.”

“Then let’s wait til she’s back, yeah?”

*

Clara stared at the Doctor, wide-eyed and in complete disbelief. Then she turned her stare to Danny, reaching out slowly to touch him as though he might fade away at any moment. “You did what?”

“I don’t know how many regenerations I had,” the Doctor said. “Could be infinite.”

“Could be three,” Danny said. “Or two. Could be that was the last one.”

“And I gave it to you! You’re welcome.”

Danny shook his head, wanting to get the conversation back on track. “So what made you realize what was going on? And how does that tie in with the—with my dreams?”

The Doctor shrugged, but with his slightly bowed head and wringing hands, he looked more apologetic than anything. “I don’t sleep often, or I would have figured it out sooner. But I’d been having dreams, memories. At first I thought they were my own—but they weren’t, were they? They were yours.”

He went dizzy and asked, “What did you dream?”

The Doctor’s eyes flickered over to Clara, then down at the table. “Doesn’t matter, does it? They were yours. I realized you might be dreaming some of mine. And you might have—felt some things. Not often, but before I could close myself off appropriately.”

“And this is all because you used your regeneration energy on him,” Clara said.

“Possibly.” He took a deep breath, as though preparing to launch into a longer explanation. “I’d initially thought it was possible something else happened, I mean it was untested and Danny was in a unique predicament-”

Clara held up a hand to stop him. “Is our baby safe?”

The Doctor nodded. “Your baby’s fine,” he said. “This won’t do anything harmful.”

“Then that’s all that matters. Right, Danny?”

“Yeah,” he said. He looked at the Doctor again, with less shock in his heart now that he and Clara knew that. “All right. So that’s it. Our baby’s safe, I’m actually a—a regeneration of you-”

“No, you’re you,” the Doctor said, his voice assuring and steady. “Pure human, nothing wrong with you, we just have some shared memories now. And really I think only where there were already similarities, where the walls were already thin.”

The walls, apparently, were thinnest in childhood memories and memories of war; there was no other explanation for how often the children’s home seemed to turn into that lonely old house on a mountainside, or how his green fields turned into something much more foreign, or how the sun beating down on him twinned itself and burned him in righteous judgment. He wondered just how much the Doctor had really seen—and how much he’d seen of the Doctor without knowing—but it was so much to take in that he had to stop himself thinking about it. “Okay,” Danny said slowly. “Not sure I really understand any of this, but as long as the baby’s all right.”

He looked at Danny and Clara, and said, “I can run a full scan. In the TARDIS, I can show you.”

*

It was only the third time Danny had set foot in the Doctor’s ship; just like the last time, he wasn’t as preoccupied with the hows and whys as he probably should have been. There was some kind of doctor’s office or medical bay just past the main room, down a hall and through a door that looked like something out of a science fiction show. He caught himself on that thought—he worked with a mix of humans and aliens in a department that dealt with invasions on a regular basis, and his partner’s best friend was one of those aliens he, at least on paper, worked with and had also managed to bring him back from the dead by giving up some of his own life energy.

His entire life, Danny realized, looked like something out of a science fiction show.

The realization was pushed aside quickly enough as Clara got up onto one of the reclining beds. There was a scanner of some kind attached to a mechanical arm coming down from the ceiling, and the Doctor positioned it right above her midriff, saying, “Just a moment, you’ll see everything’s perfectly all right, don’t worry Clara. Don’t worry at all.”

Danny took Clara’s hand, kissed it, then watched the screen the Doctor was working on beside her. He pressed some buttons; nothing showed up, but from the corner of his eye Danny saw movement. Above Clara, a holographic, three dimensional display appeared. “God,” he breathed. For a moment, everything disappeared except for the image in front of him, and Clara beside him. His entire existence narrowed to that pinpoint in time, and he couldn’t bring himself to think of anything else.

“Scan shows nothing out of the ordinary,” the Doctor said triumphantly. He turned back to them. Behind the hologram, the Doctor’s smile quickly withered into a frown, and he stepped to Clara’s other side. “Your eyes have gone big. Are you crying? But everything’s all right-”

“She’s happy,” Danny said, and she was. When he was finally able to tear his eyes away from the image of their child, he looked down at her, still staring at the hologram. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and wet. “Right?”

She spoke with a weak voice. “Right. Oh my god, she’s so clear. The doctors said it was too early to tell, but she’s so clear-”

“Doctor, take Clara’s hand,” Danny said quietly. The Doctor frowned and looked down at her other hand, but took it in his own, slowly, almost hesitantly. No, not hesitantly, Danny realized. Reverently. She took Danny’s hand and pressed her lips to it, then did the same to the Doctor’s. 

The Doctor—anxious, confused, curious—looked to her, then to Danny. “Everything’s all right,” he repeated, though it slightly sounded like a question.

“Yeah,” Danny said. He smiled at him and nodded at the image; their little girl, serene and sweet, utterly impossible and so completely real. “Don’t worry. You did good.” 

Wordlessly, the Doctor frowned at the image, then down at Clara’s belly, as though there were something to say. “I-” he started, only to cut himself off with a shake of his head. “Everything’s all right.” 

Danny thought nothing of it, but there was a wobble to the Doctor’s voice that he couldn’t miss.


	7. Chapter 7

Out of the blue, he stopped dropping by.

The Doctor had been doing well, coming to visit once a week if not more, helping out around the house (and occasionally “helping” in ways that they thanked him for before Danny went about fixing whatever it was he’d “helped” with), and simply being there for the two of them when they needed a friend around. There had been days where he seemed to be even more nervous than either Danny or Clara, where he’d hovered around both of them with an expression half between a scowl and tears. Then he’d be gone for a few minutes or a few hours, only to come back calmer and more composed and noticeably more alien. The tell, for Danny at least, had his hair—sometimes longer by an inch or more, and he’d fallen into the habit of teasing him over it—but for Clara, all she’d needed to do was listen to him talk or look him in the eyes for a moment before she’d ask, “How long were you alone?” The Doctor had simply looked at her when she’d done that, brushed off her questions, and re-entered the cycle of working himself into a spiky anxious mess before having to leave for a moment.

The dreams had gotten worse over that time, his own insecurity over whether he’d be around for his daughter manifesting as nightmarish hellscapes of loneliness in hot reds and oranges, in chilly gray rock-strewn no-man’s lands and prisons with puzzles he couldn’t solve taking the place of bars and locked doors. Places where the walls were already thin, he’d thought, and he’d wondered if the Doctor had had any advice he could give.

Then a month before she was due, he stopped coming back. “He loses track sometimes,” Clara had said; Danny had been certain she was reassuring herself more than him, but he’d nodded and went along with her. Her family had been there, and her friends, and his too—his shoulders were a bit sore from the backslapping, if he were being honest, and he’d had to turn down more drinks than he’d accepted. For anybody else, it would have been happy enough. But her best friend was in space or out of space or in some other dimension somewhere, hopefully capable of making an appearance, yet he was choosing not to. “I’ll call him,” she’d said. “I’ll call him again, he’ll come by.”

A week away from the expected date suddenly became the day of, and Clara became a bit too busy to call.

*

The delivery itself was a blur for him; he wasn’t sure what it was for her, besides long and arduous, but when it was done, there was, much to his surprise in spite of the months-long lead-up, a child. Their child. Something strange clicked on in his reptilian brain when he saw Clara, exhausted, ecstatic, dazed and streaked with sweat and tears, with their girl in her arms. Some sense of protection, and of breaking anyone who tried to harm them, shuddered through him and made a home in his heart. 

He leaned down and pressed his forehead against Clara’s, barely feeling as she shifted and kissed him. “Love you,” she whispered.

“I love you,” he said. He looked down at their daughter, now resting after her grand, loud, brash entrance. They’d talked about a name before. There’d been almost no discussion needed, once they’d known she was a girl. “Look at our Ellie, Clara. She’s so perfect.”

“Yeah,” she said, breaking into a weary but glowing grin. 

The rest of her family was about to be let in, and he wanted to be there with them but he knew—“I’ll go call him, okay?”

She curled Ellie up closer to her and nodded, her eyes wide and grateful as he finally left her side.

The number had been on his phone for a few months, but he’d never used it. It was always Clara calling, Clara leaving messages, Clara letting the Doctor know in vain when to stop over. He walked outside, the fresh air hitting him hard and he pulled his phone out. It was cruel, maybe, to text, “Emergency. Clara needs you,” without explanation or preamble, but it was crueler the way he had stopped coming. Moments after he’d hit send, he heard the low whine of the TARDIS materializing, and looked around to find the familiar blue box not ten feet from the door to the hospital. 

The Doctor slipped out quickly and made it halfway to him in short order; Danny made up the rest of the distance before his shove knocked the Doctor back just as fast. “Fuck you,” he spat out.

Staring up at him, confused and trying to prop himself up off the ground with both hands, the Doctor asked, “Is she all right?”

“New mum and her baby are both fine,” Danny said. “Where the hell have you been? How could you just leave her without a word?”

Fearful-eyed, he made as though to stand, mumbling, “You said it was an emergency. You said she needed me-”

“Surprise.” He shoved the Doctor back down. “She doesn’t.” A flicker of self-doubt crossed the Doctor’s eyes, then a dimming of light, and Danny sighed and said, “She doesn’t need your help, I mean. She needs her best friend.”

“I’m here now,” he said weakly.

“And you weren’t for the last month.” When the Doctor tried to stand again, he said, “Stay right where you are. Don’t tell me you forgot or lost track of the time, you managed to stay on schedule right up until you decided not to. I don’t understand, didn’t you already have this conversation with her?”

“What conversation?”

“The one about—leaving, suddenly, no warning.”

The lights from the hospital grounds cast low around them. Danny could barely make out the Doctor’s expressions, but he could see him running a hand over his mouth, he could hear the choke in his voice when he said, “We did, but—I thought it would be better. If I just went away, it would be better-”

With that, he grabbed the Doctor by the lapels of his coat and hauled him up, half throwing him against the TARDIS doors. “How would it be better? To abandon her like that? What on earth is wrong with you?”

“The last time, they did things, they used her to try and get to me-” The Doctor was babbling, words spilling out so fast they were nearly tripping over each other. “I’m not good at this. I’m no good at keeping people safe, but you are, aren’t you? She’s safe with you, and happy, and—and that’s good. That’s the best, Danny.”

Danny searched his face for anything callous, or patronizing, anything at all condescending; he found fear. Self-loathing, too, and he could feel that projecting into his own bones and turning into something else, an anger that had no home in his heart. His grip loosening, he said, “It’s not. Doctor, you are her best friend. She’s signed on—I hate to admit this—for whatever bullshit you end up putting her through. I know you care about her but you can’t make the call to walk away without at least telling her, also you’re not making any sense. Who used her? What last time?”

“Not her, not Clara,” the Doctor said. A cold knot settled heavily in Danny’s chest. Some other friend of his, then, who’d met a grisly fate. Something that could happen to Clara, the memory of which had been triggered by her pregnancy. “You were right about me, ages ago. Do you remember what you told me when we met?”

“Pretty clearly, yeah.”

He swallowed. “I was calculating. I knew the best approach, and no silly little human was going to tell me otherwise. And if someone became collateral damage, I-” He paused, unable to speak for a moment, and when he spoke again the words tumbled out quickly. “That’s what the Time Lords were like. It’s simple, to presume yourself the experts, the keepers of all knowledge. Oh Danny, you have no idea. It’s why I ran away—please, I never wanted to be that.”

“But you went back for the war?”

“I had to. I didn’t—it was awful, it had to stop. And in the end, I was going to stop it. It’s so much easier to make an awful choice if you think it was the right one.”

Danny let his hands drop finally, and then scrubbed at his face. “I thought you saved your planet. That’s what Clara told me.”

The Doctor smiled a weak, closed-mouth smile. “I didn’t. She did. I was going to destroy it, and she—showed me something else. Convinced me there had to be another way, and when I thought about it, there was. Silly little human, outsmarted me in an instant. I still made a grave mistake and fixing it doesn’t undo that. What’s done in your heart can never be undone.”

A people erased from existence. A friend’s life and last vestige of home threatened, a single horrifically wrong shot. All of it revealed to be righted in the end, at first blush all the stories got their happily ever afters, but the intent, the words, the negligence remained as fixed moments in time; it was luck that they’d gotten their second chances, Danny knew, nothing more. 

But if it was luck that had given them those second chances, it was grit and a deliberate, ruthless hold that got the three to where they were now. Danny had been born to be alone, had been given romantic dreams of it as a child and had fallen into the nightmare of it as an adult; Clara and the Doctor as well, it seemed, had run similar gauntlets. He was finished running that gauntlet by himself, and he was finished with the people in his life thinking they were by themselves. 

His child was just a short walk away from them. His child, and his partner, and they wouldn’t be there were it not for the frightened creature in front of him. This being that Danny had once thought had figured himself as a demigod—scared witless of what he might do to people he loved, doubtful of his ability to make the right choices and running before he could make the wrong one. “Maybe they can’t be undone,” Danny said quietly. “That doesn’t mean you can’t do other things. Maybe you never make up for it, but you stop yourself from doing it again and you do something else that’s better, don’t you?”

“I’ve got to remember who I’ve been,” he said.

Danny shook his head. “But you can’t let it take over who you are now.” He reached back into his memories, something itching in the back of his mind. “That's the woman you love in there,” he said. “How much time are you going to waste?”

The Doctor looked down for a moment, then up at the hospital as though he were trying to find Clara’s room. “She needs me?”

Even the sturdiest people, Danny thought. “She might be sleeping now, but yeah.”

“Stupid humans,” the Doctor said, though the harshness in his words sounded fake to Danny’s ears. “I do you a favor by walking away to keep you from danger, and you call me back regardless.”

“Yeah, we’re pretty dumb,” Danny muttered. He grabbed the Doctor by the shoulder and half-dragged him to the hospital door. “You ready to see her?”

The Doctor nodded, then stopped in his tracks. “Hang on, I’ve left something-” Before Danny could think to stop him, he turned back to the TARDIS, slipped inside, and within moments Danny’s heart sank as he heard and saw it dematerializing.

He walked back in alone, unsure of what he would tell Clara.

*

After her—their—family left for the night, wishing them well and congratulating all around, Danny sat down next to her and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The smile stayed on her face, but she looked sad all the same, as though she were too tired to figure out how to drop the smile. “Why won’t he come?” she asked; she didn’t sound like she expected an answer. He took Ellie from her, savoring the feel of his daughter in his arms, and placed her almost regretfully in her crib before coming back to sit next to Clara.

“He just needs time, I think,” Danny said. 

She looked thoughtfully at the crib before turning back to him. “He’s scared, isn’t he? You saw him just now and he ran. I just wish he could see what I see.”

He didn’t question how she knew the Doctor had come around and left again. “You might want to have a talk with him, next time you see him.”

“Well she can’t talk now.” They both looked up in surprise to see the Doctor striding through the door to her room, an air of confidence around him so thin that Danny could see right through it to his anxious core. His hair was longer and he was wearing a different shirt, but Danny didn’t bother asking him how long he’d been gone. “She looks terrible, Clara you should probably seek medical help for that.”

“You’re such a twat,” she said, though Danny could hear the worry and malice slipping away almost immediately.

“Such language in front of a newborn?” he scolded. “Where is she?”

Clara pointed to the crib by her bed, and the Doctor walked over to it. It was only when he was directly in front of little Ellie that his expression faltered. Instead of the stony detached facade, there was a flinch, and then an open expression of awe. “She’s all wrinkles,” he said with wonder.

“She’s beautiful,” Clara stated, with the voice of someone used to steamrolling the Doctor’s rudeness.

“That’s hormones talking,” the Doctor said. “You two have created a wrinkle.”

Danny had held her earlier, wrinkles and wailing and discomfort at everything around her. He itched to get her into his arms again, but he said, “Why don’t you pick her up? She’s sleeping, she won’t even notice.”

“Of course she won’t notice, I’m fantastic with babies,” the Doctor said dismissively. Still, he looked at Danny uncertainly, then back down to Ellie. Carefully, but with a practiced ease, he held her in his hands and brought her to his chest. It was too practiced, he thought. 

There was a planet missing that the Doctor had once thought he’d destroyed, Danny realized, and another that he’d lived on for hundreds of years, protecting it while whole generations died and were born. He held their child so expertly, and so gently, with the touch of a man who’d been a father before. There was a look on his face, at once pained, humbled, awestruck, found and lost again—gone in a moment, fleeting and hidden away, but there just long enough for Danny to witness it.

“Doctor,” Clara said. “Don’t stay away that long again.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not.” Danny looked at Clara, who looked at him with a knowing smile. She understood the Doctor’s beats better than probably the Doctor himself, and by the look on her face she knew he was bluffing. He sat heavily in the rocking chair on the other side of Clara’s bed, weighed down by whatever he was trying so hard to hide from them. “Though I suppose someone should make certain this little one is raised properly.”

Clara chuckled, sounding weary but at peace; when Danny looked at Clara again, her eyes were drifting shut. He brushed the hair from her forehead and watched her fall asleep. Then, folding his arms on the bed next to her, he put his head down and closed his own eyes.

After what felt like only a moment, he heard something in the room, above the monitors and machines, above the sound of Clara breathing beside him. The Doctor, still in the rocking chair, looking down at Ellie; that utterly broken expression was back on his face, but he didn’t seem to realize Danny was awake and looking at him. He must have known, except he was too caught up in the child in his arms. In the low light of the hospital room, Danny could only just make out the glint of a tear rolling down his cheek. It felt obscene and invasive, watching him like this, and Danny wondered if he should say something, cough or make some minor noise, just to remind the Doctor that there were others in the room.

Then, closing his eyes, the Doctor began to sing: a whispered lullaby, from deep in his chest, the words like a curl of light through the dark. Danny didn’t know the language yet it felt familiar enough; he shut his eyes again, listening to the Doctor sing to Ellie as though he were soothing his own child to sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

“I’m taking her on camping trips,” he said. “Can’t wait to take her on camping trips, really.”

He was holding her, feeding her while Clara napped in their bedroom. Kate had dropped by with an armful of cooked food, frozen and parceled out so all they’d need to do was reheat when they were ready, and was now sitting with him in the living room drinking a cup of tea. “With lots of adventure, of course?” she asked.

“Nope. It’ll be nice and boring. She’s got Clara for adventure.” He smiled down at Ellie, who looked slightly confused that her milk wasn’t coming from her mum, but otherwise content. 

“Bit of boring’s not bad,” she said. “Speaking of Clara, I had actually come here with ulterior motives.”

“I think she’ll take it,” he said, “as long as the position’s still open when she’s ready to start working again.”

“We can always use someone of her caliber and distinct knowledge. The position will be open.” Agent in UNIT’s special projects team was a far cry from English teacher, but Clara had nearly been salivating when Kate had come by and pitched the idea to her during her pregnancy. She’d have backup and resources, and she’d have even more people around her like what he had, people who could understand the strange things that go on in their lives and who could treat it as the normal occurrences they really were. 

“Hear that, Ellie?” he murmured. “Your mum’s going to be a superhero. All Agents of SHIELD, like.”

Kate cocked her head to the side and frowned. “Not quite SHIELD, though we do work with them rather often.”

His head snapped up in confusion. “Huh?”

“Joke, Danny.” She raised her cup as he sighed in relief. “We don’t work with SHIELD at all if we can help it.”

He blinked at her a few times. “I can never tell when you’re joking,” he said. “Like ever. Are you joking now? Am I going to find out tomorrow Captain America’s real or something?”

“How much sleep are you getting?” she asked with a laugh. “Danny, relax. Please.”

“I don’t think I’m relaxing for another few decades,” he mumbled. He positioned the towel on his shoulder and put Ellie up to see if she needed to burp. “Do you ever get any, you know. Less terrified of things?”

Kate took a deep breath as she thought of the answer. “That question’s a bit more complicated than it sounds.”

“Good. Great. Looking forward to complicated.”

“Yeah, it’s loads of fun. Worth it, though.”

He looked down at Ellie, calm and content as she rested on his shoulder. Brown skin like him, big round eyes like her mum, the entire universe waiting for her and she looked like she knew it. “I bet,” he murmured.

Kate reached over to stroke Ellie’s little hand. “Already planning everything out for her?”

“Not everything,” he said quickly. “Just—that first camping trip. That’s all. And if she likes it, that’s when I’ll plan the next.”

“Well, that’s fine,” she said. “Nothing too outlandish for you, then?”

He shrugged and kissed Ellie, who didn’t seem to need burping at all, thankfully. “I figure there’ll be enough outlandish stuff in this world for her to deal with,” he said. “And she’ll know about all of it, I promise that. Why not give her something a bit silly and tame to round it out?”

Kate nodded, raised her half-empty cup in a toast, and said, “Sound plan, Pink.”

*

Things were mostly settling down in their household. Danny still had some time before he would start work again—Kate had made sure they had as much time as they needed, more than he was officially allowed if he wanted it, but the Doctor had dropped in one day and announced he would make good on his offer to babysit. 

Clara had immediately banned him from psychically putting the child to sleep. He’d looked slightly offended, but he’d grudgingly agreed. “She understands me when I talk, anyway,” he’d said.

Danny was more than happy to take Ellie off Clara’s hands whenever possible, and was fairly sure he wasn’t screwing up the whole dad-thing too badly. It was, when he sat down one morning and thought about it with Ellie in his arms and Clara singing off key as she took a shower, basically a perfectly normal happily ever after. Then the Doctor came through the front door, asking what the racket was and whether Clara had taken ill, and Danny had a mind to put a footnote under that assessment.

The Doctor bent over and bopped Ellie’s nose. “Hello, little one,” he said. “Are you bored yet? Would you like to come do something exciting with me?”

“She’s not even a month old,” Danny said. “I could show her paint swatches and she’d get excited.”

“Takes after her dad, then,” the Doctor said. He sat down on the sofa beside them. “Which is fine.”

Danny kissed Ellie’s cheek and said, “Anyway, we already have plans. Her mum’s doing a postnatal checkup, and we’re going to the park after.”

“The park? That sounds like something you’d come up with, dull and pointless.”

The Doctor hadn’t quite figured out that they weren’t on the level of allowing friendly insults, but Danny wasn’t sure the Doctor was the type of person who could figure such a thing out, so he had decided to simply let them slide some time before. “You’re welcome to join us. Ellie quite likes our walks.”

The mention of their girl was like sugar to a sweets addict. The Doctor’s eyes lit up, though he tried in vain to hide it. “Well. When you put it that way.”

*

The office Clara was visiting was across from a park, and she gave them her blessing to wait in the warm sun without her. In her carriage, little Ellie slept; it seemed that all she did was sleep, eat, cry, and make messes that Danny thought were far too large for a person her size. That was fine. She’d have her entire life ahead of her to take walks, take trips, or do whatever else she liked. 

On the park bench, with the baby carriage between them, the Doctor sat and watched out into the park with a frown on his face. “Is this what you do?” he asked. 

From his tone, it wasn’t meant to be rude. Danny shrugged. “What, sit in the park, and people-watch? Yeah, sometimes.”

He cocked his head, eyes flickering across the scene before him, looking somehow more alien than he’d ever looked before. “It’s strange,” he murmured. “I don’t think I’ve done this very much. Not while it was—not during peace-time.”

Hesitantly, Danny said, “Sometimes I have to deliberately try and make the change.” Off the Doctor’s curious look, he added, “To not be on the lookout for enemy combatants, I mean. That’s one of the reasons I started doing this. Had to relearn how to watch just for watching’s sake, to figure out a way to be...different, I guess, from how I was trained.”

The Doctor nodded, though it was still clearly something foreign to him. “Of course. Deprogramming oneself not to be quite so vigilant all the time. It makes sense in a life like yours.”

“Yeah, in a life like mine,” he said. He looked around him: bright, sunny day, people going through their lives in their own little bubbles. Happy people, mostly, or happy-seeming. There were couples and children, friends out enjoying the warmth or sitting in the shade of the trees—normal trees, just regular old trees and regular old grass. No desert heat or cold metal, no stark white virtual afterlife; and no strange moments for the people he saw before him. On this day, in this moment, there was only sun, laughter, and relaxation. He would take a step forward, then one after that, and in days to come he would dream of those things he’s done, but he’d dream them under a night sky in a campground with his wife and daughter. He’d dream them to the sound of rain hitting the bedroom window. A life like his, a life less ordinary, but with enough love that that didn’t matter. “Have you ever tried it?”

“Tried what?”

He pulled Ellie from her stroller and kissed her soft cheek. “Slowing down.”

The Doctor shrugged. “What would I do?”

“I know it’s not some massive, epic adventure, but let me ask you something. Do you really have to be running around, saving the universe all the time? Isn’t something like this, just—babies, parks—isn’t that strange and different?” He looked at the Doctor and waited for an answer. But Danny recognized the look of a man searching for escape routes, so he said, “Here, I need to check something—could you hold Ellie for a moment?”

The Doctor took her without thinking, as Danny pretended to fumble with his phone. Before he reached the point where he’d have to actually come up with a reason for handing Ellie off, his phone buzzed a notification. “That was Clara,” he said. “She just texted, she’ll be out in a few minutes.”

For once, the Doctor didn’t seem that interested in Clara or her whereabouts. He was frowning down at Ellie, so small in his large hands, who was looking up at him with her big brown eyes, curious and bright. “Yes,” the Doctor murmured, though Danny was sure he had barely heard him.

“Doctor,” he asked, “are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said quickly. “It’s just...I’m sorry, I need to be honest. There is a thread. A single strand. I feel-” He sat back against the park bench, the frown deepening into something both fearful and awestruck. 

“Feel what, Doctor?” He tried to keep his voice steady and panic-free, but the Doctor must have picked up on it, because he looked up at Danny as though startled.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, no, she’s safe, Danny. She’s perfectly human.” He looked back down at Ellie and cuddled her closer. “It’s just whenever I hold her, I feel her in my hearts, and gets stronger with each passing day. I wasn’t looking, I didn’t notice at first—I didn’t realize, when I brought you back I didn’t think-”

All those anxious moments, going back to the first time they saw Ellie in the TARDIS, made sense suddenly. “You feel her like she’s your own,” Danny said. “All those times you got like you were nervous about something, it wasn’t just worry, was it?”

The Doctor’s brows furrowed, he opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Then, he closed his eyes and kissed the crown of Ellie’s head. “I’m sorry, Danny.”

He shrugged. “Don’t be. Listen. I had no parents at all. She’s got three, I’d take that option any day. I mean, you’re gonna have to explain it to Clara, I’m not sure I get it really, but otherwise, eh.”

“It doesn’t bother you?” the Doctor asked.

“I’d be bothered if she wasn’t safe,” Danny said. “But she’s safe here, or at least as safe as possible. Am I right?”

The Doctor was silent for a long moment, as though he knew she was safe, but didn’t know how to admit it. “There’s an alien over there, playing chess,” he said. “With the girl. She’s going to win, I think. Two more waiting in line for ice cream.”

He saw them; they looked human, and the two waiting for ice cream seemed rather excited about it. He wondered if it would be their first, if anyone gave them any recommendations. If they were a danger, the Doctor would have been up and running already. Quietly, although he already knew the answer, he asked, “They’re not a danger to Ellie, are they?”

“No.”

“You knew there was nothing dangerous here, but you’re constantly looking for it anyway. Is it the adrenaline rush, or can you just not turn it off?” There was no response, so he looked straight ahead, sighed, and said, “You can stop fighting, Doctor. At least when you’re with us.”

“That way lies the abyss, I fear,” the Doctor sighed. “I’m not made for this.”

“Yeah, sounds like you were made to be some kind of stuffy old bastard sitting in some tower with other stuffy old bastards somewhere,” he said. “Deciding the fate of the little people. Somehow you avoided being that.” He frowned, hesitating. “And...you’re her dad. Right? Sort of? You can do this.”

There was a very long silence; Danny glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, and saw a man blinking rapidly, struggling to keep himself in check. “You’re very annoying,” he finally said.

“I try my best,” Danny said with a smile. 

“Congratulations,” the Doctor said, “you’re quite good at it.”

“Quite good at what?” Both of them looked over to see Clara coming around the park bench to take Ellie from the Doctor and sit snugly between the two of them. 

“At being lovely and wonderful,” Danny said. The Doctor snorted.

“Hmm.” She kissed his cheek, then Ellie’s, then the Doctor’s; if he hadn’t been looking at her, Danny might have missed the expression on the Doctor’s face. Only slight consternation over the public kiss, overshadowed completely by the look of adoration in his eyes. 

When the Doctor met his gaze, he saw a recognition there. As if to say, she saved me too. 

Clara had brought him back. Not just from the dead, and not just by the strange series of events that had allowed him to make right his greatest sin, but even before that. For all her flaws, the woman between them, idly talking to their daughter while preparing to feed her, was his hero. More than anyone else on the planet.

Once upon a time, he’d thought he could be an anchor for someone, but Clara didn’t need an anchor. It would only make her sink. He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her jaw, right below her ear, and grinned when she looked at him in slight surprise. “What was that for?” she asked with a slow smile.

“Do you want to go on a little vacation someday?” he asked. “When Ellie’s old enough, we could go to visit some lighthouses.”

“Lighthouses,” she repeated with an incredulous laugh.

He pulled a face of mock indignation. “I like lighthouses. Imagine all those sailors, lost in fog or darkness, all of a sudden seeing a light guiding them to safety before sailing off again. That’s pretty neat, yeah?”

“Sure,” she said, confused and clearly humoring him, but smiling nonetheless. “We’ll see your lighthouses.”

“There’s a lighthouse in the dark matter cluster Gandrovanis Prime,” the Doctor said, taking on the air of some kind of smug professor. “Brightest lighthouse in the seven galaxies. I’ve been there.”

“Maybe you could take us there, then,” Danny said. The owlish, surprised blinking he received in response was enough to get him chuckling. “Right Clara?”

She smiled at him, then the Doctor. “Right.”


	9. Epilogue

“Shhh.” He reached into the crib, his hands gently lifting up his daughter as she cried and squirmed against him. She didn’t seem too cold or too hot, and she didn’t need changing; when he held her against his chest, her wails nearly stopped, and he broke into a wide grin. “Oh, that’s all, love? Hush then, your secret agent mum needs her rest.”

Big brown eyes looked up at him as her little brown fingers tried to wrap around one of his own. “Yeah, it’s me, dad. Regular dad, not space dad. You know not everybody’s got a space dad, Ellie? We’re a bit weird. But it’s all right, this is a tough little family, and we do weird.” She laughed at him, smiling toothlessly, unaware of anything he was saying; he laughed back and kissed her nose, curled her up against him and cooed in her ear. “We do weird very well, thanks for asking.”

She was drifting back to sleep when he heard the door creak open. “Is everything all right?” the Doctor whispered.

“Space dad’s here,” Danny whispered to Ellie, but she was already out.

“Yes, space dad,” the Doctor murmured. He reached for her just as gently as Danny had, and Danny put her in the Doctor’s hands. “Space dad is here to save you from boring dad, little one.”

“I think she just wants a little cuddling,” Danny said. “She’ll be all right now.”

“Hmm.” He took a look at Ellie’s sleeping form, then lay her back down in her crib. “Then good on you, waking up your father like that. He needs a little excitement in his life. Back to sleep, child.”

Danny leaned against the chest of drawers and crossed his arms over his chest. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

“Parked outside,” he said. “Took the lift up.”

It was check-in time, though he knew in his heart what the answer would be. Whenever the Doctor was on his own for too long, he got a certain air about him, a certain antsiness. Constantly on guard, hyper-alert and thinking so fast he couldn’t keep up with himself. “How long has it been for you?”

“Only a day.” It was clearly enough a lie; the Doctor’s gaze went back to the child sleeping in her crib, as though he were unable to look away for too long. “She looks so peaceful.”

“Nah, you should’ve seen her earlier. She’s just tuckered out from all that screaming.”

“Oh, good. Screaming is a vital survival skill,” the Doctor said. 

Danny watched him watch Ellie, the way his hands curled around the rail of the crib, visibly holding himself back. The Doctor had forgotten, in his time away. He’d put himself back out in the fog and the dark without even knowing it. Ducking his head, he said, “You know, she’d stay sleeping just fine if you wanted to pick her up and hold her. You might remember, the rocking chair’s pretty comfy if you want to sit.”

The Doctor’s head snapped up, and he looked at Danny with wide hopeful eyes. “Do you think?”

“Go on.”

He lifted her up again so reverently that Danny’s breath caught in his throat. The Doctor would never settle down, unable to stop moving through the universe, unable to stop running. Clara—Clara would never settle either, not really, but life was one big adventure for her and he knew a child and a home were just another road on her journey. It was the Doctor he worried for, as old as the stars and just as tempestuous, just as fearful of getting too close and burning the very things he wished only to shine his light upon. “She’s gotten so big. She’s so beautiful, I-”

Danny sat down cross-legged in front of him, waiting for the end of a sentence that wasn’t coming. Eventually he asked again, “How long, Doctor?” The look on his face was answer enough, and Danny sighed. He feared the Doctor’s war would never be over, that no matter what he learned, he would never fully shed that anxiety over the potential to become the things he hated, or the memories of how close he had come in the past. Neither he nor Clara could keep him from running too long and too far, not even little Ellie could do that, but at least they could keep the light on for him.

The Doctor looked up out the window. “You know, the sky’s really quite beautiful here,” he murmured. “I’m surprised, given all the light pollution. You can actually see some stars.”

He shrugged and scratched the back of his neck, glancing away. “It’s not that great. You of all people must have seen better.”

“Well, yes. But also no.” He sighed and began to rock gently, looking down at Ellie before looking at Danny. “Not a single creature anywhere else in the universe is experiencing this moment. It’s unique in all of time and space.”

“Never thought I’d hear you say that.” They both looked up to see Clara leaning in the doorway, a sleepy smile on her face as she watched the three of them. She walked in with a yawn, kissed the Doctor’s cheek and ruffled his hair, kissed Ellie lightly so as not to wake her, before leaning down to kiss Danny. “You all threw a party and didn’t invite me?”

“You needed your beauty rest,” Danny said.

“Yes,” said the Doctor, smiling helpfully. “You need all of that you can get.”

She shook her head and sighed. “Anyway. Ellie didn’t give you any trouble, did she?”

“Never,” the Doctor said. “Danny was so boring she went right back to sleep immediately.”

Danny rolled his eyes, reached up for Clara’s hand, and stood with her help. “Let’s go back to bed.”

Clara nodded and kissed him as he stood. But she turned back to the Doctor, cocked her head to the side and said, “You know what’s funny?"

The Doctor glanced up at her, still holding Ellie close to him. “What’s that?”

“I woke up before Ellie started crying. Like I knew she’d start crying, and I woke up and told Danny to go check. Barely remember doing it because I went back to sleep right after.”

“Ah. Mother’s intuition,” he said with a knowing grin.

Her face did a funny thing then, a half-frown that twitched into a half-smile. “I woke up again knowing you were here. I didn’t hear you at all, I just sort of...felt it.”

The Doctor nodded, looking for all the world as though he comprehended what she was saying but wish he didn’t. “Hmm,” he said, before turning his attention back to Ellie.

Danny and Clara traded a glance; he’d be gone by morning. They’d see him again, and eventually, when Clara was ready, he’d take her with him, but until then they’d simply have to deal with these fits of disappearing for, in the Doctor’s timeline at least, ages. 

Still. They’d see him again. He knew it in his heart and knew that Clara knew it in hers, and maybe, eventually, when he’d had enough time to work it out, the Doctor would know too that he didn’t have to fear standing still with them for a moment. Danny squeezed his shoulder and said, “Stay with her as long as you like. See you in the morning?”

“Sure,” he said, too quickly. They walked out hand in hand, leaving the Doctor with Ellie, closing the door quietly behind them. 

“Hang on,” Clara whispered. She put her ear to the door and smiled, waving Danny back.

The Doctor had begun to sing, wistful and low, those graceful alien notes painting the night like embers. Danny closed his eyes, and listened.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [All That We See or Seem](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4671182) by [DaraOakwise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaraOakwise/pseuds/DaraOakwise)




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